Mea Culpa: the Long Sentence of the Week prize is awarded to ...

A 67-word sentence, an item of clothing and some usage quibbles from this week’s Independent

Young Corbyn supporters in Brighton for their victory rally known as Labour conference (Getty)

Praise where it is due, and it is due this week to Tom Peck, our political sketch writer, who showed that, occasionally and if done well, long sentences can be a joy. Take this from his account of a fringe meeting held in Brighton on Sunday by Progress, the New Labour pressure group:

“It’s hard to avoid the feeling that these are Labour’s grown-ups, making grave pronouncements about their children’s hopes and dreams, nobly putting forward the ideas that can bend things back towards a better future, but pretending not to have noticed the children all left for a school trip years ago, the plane’s crashed on a desert island, they’ve all gone fully feral and they’re never coming back.”

You think he has lost control of the aircraft when he brings it in to land with the finality of its ending. Wonderful.

Fashion Ed: So I hope Tom won’t mind if I quibble with the way he described one of the prizes offered by Ed Miliband when he hosted a quiz night for Momentum at the Labour conference: “The unwashed camouflage t-shirt he wore on The Last Leg.” It’s called a T-shirt because it is in the shape of a capital T. A shirt like a lower-case “t” would look odd, even on a fashion model such as Labour’s former leader.

Cutting edge: Our editorial after Jeremy Corbyn’s big speech this week ended by saying: “They may be disappointed by Theresa May, bored of Nigel Farage, and uninspired by Vince Cable, but the British people will not necessarily turn to Jeremy Corbyn … The world hasn’t been transformed that much.”

It was a clever play on “The World Transformed”, the name of the grassroots festival held alongside the official conference, with which the article had started. A shame, therefore, to distract the reader by using the form “bored of”. There is no reason for preferring “bored with” or “bored by”, but we ought to know that some of our readers think “bored of” and “fed up of” are wrong because that is how they were taught. Usage is changing, but it is better for The Independent not to be at the abrasive cutting edge of that change.

Licence to drill: Another usage that caught us out this week, as most weeks, is the difference between practice and practise and between licence and license. If they are nouns we are supposed to spell them with a “c”; if they are verbs (or the adjectives formed from verbs), it’s an “s”. This is complicated by American usage, which is to spell practice with a “c” and license with an “s”, regardless.

Tom Freeman investigated the origin of the differences in British English a couple of years ago, and found the practice/practise difference was in place 300 years ago. This reflected different pronunciations, which is why advice and advise, device and devise and prophecy and prophesy are spelled the way they are.

But practice and practise are now pronounced the same, and licence/license always was, which may be why that distinction, a 19th-century attempt to make its spelling match practice/practise, “has struggled to catch on”.

As Tom comments: “Those of us who’ve had the distinctions drilled into our heads will continue to twitch when we notice a ‘wrong’ spelling, but in time we’ll die out. The earth will close over our heads and English will live on, that bit more efficient for being rid of us.”